“Heck, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we have this class in the training center?” Lofton spoke up in his lazy surfer drawl.
Ran felt her ears go red. Thanks to her roommate Isabela and the Academy’s inadequate soundproofing, the mere sound of Lofton’s voice made her blush with discomfort.
“Yeah. After your lecture on all the horrible things we’ll be facing, most of us could probably use the extra training time,” Lisbette said. She cast an envious look in Ran’s direction. “Some of us haven’t beaten Professor Nine’s obstacle course yet.”
“Correction. Only one of us has done that solo,” Nigel said, looking in Ran’s direction as well, his face filled with pride. She pretended not to notice either of them.
“But that is exactly why we’re here,” Dr. Chen said. “Just because you’re expected to be soldiers doesn’t mean that has to be the sum total of your lives. As I’ve said before, you must remember that you are not weapons. You are people. And like all people, but especially Peacekeepers, you must aspire to be above violence. Today, I want us to think about how your violent Legacies might be used in unconventional ways, towards altruistic or beneficial purposes. Have any of you considered that?”
The room went silent. Ran looked down at her hands, both of them splayed on top of her desk.
“Approach it simply,” Dr. Chen pressed. “What is one way that you could use your Legacies where no one would get hurt?”
“I can lift heavy things,” Nicolas said at last, uncertainty in his voice. “Like, help build houses and stuff, right?”
“Good,” Dr. Chen replied. “That’s a start.”
“We can all do that, brother,” Nigel replied. “That’s what the telekinesis is for, innit?” At a look from Nicolas, Nigel held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. Unlike me, you’re strong enough to be the beams in a skyscraper. Muscles from Brussels the sequel over here. But what can you lift with your hands that the rest of us couldn’t lift with our minds? Nah, mate. That Legacy o’ yours is good for punching. Strictly punching—”
“Thank you, Nigel,” interrupted Dr. Chen. “Do you have any thoughts on your own Legacies?”
“Oh, I’m easy-peasy. I can help the deaf to hear. I can shout tornado warnings across small towns. I can auto-tune rap songs.”
“Ice sculptures,” Lisbette said suddenly.
Dr. Chen turned in her direction. “What was that?”
“Um, I’ve been making ice sculptures in my spare time,” Lisbette elaborated. “For fun. I can do that.”
“Auto-tune? Ice sculptures? Dr. Chen’s not asking about useless tricks,” Maiken scoffed. “There’s a water shortage in some countries, Lisbette. God. Ice melts. You can create water.”
“Oh yeah,” Lisbette said. “That too.”
Dr. Chen held up a hand. “Now, hold on. Let’s not discount artistic applications. One could argue that art is an altruistic use of one’s Legacies, with intangible benefits to society.”
“Hell yeah,” Nigel said. “I’d rather have the Sweet than some bloody water, that’s for sure. Follow your inner artist, Lizzy.”
Caleb raised his hand. “Organ donation.”
Dr. Chen turned to him. “Could you elaborate on that, Caleb?”
“Well, I can duplicate myself,” Caleb explained. “So, a surgeon could perform an operation on one of my duplicates, take the organs and give them to someone in need.”
Lofton made a face. “Do those clones of yours even have organs, dude?”
Caleb blinked. “I mean, I obviously haven’t dissected one, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Nigel gave Ran a look—the same slack-jawed and cross-eyed expression he broke out whenever his roommate did something weird. She gently tipped her head in response, reminding Nigel that he was supposed to be making an effort with Caleb. Unlike Nigel, she never blamed Caleb for the episode months ago with the Chimæra. He was just following orders.
“Mate,” Nigel started in a gentler tone than the one he’d used with Nicolas. “Don’t your duplicates disappear when you get too far away from them?”
“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “But my range is getting farther . . .”
Nigel rubbed the back of his neck. “Right. But, uh, assuming them clones even have hearts and livers and whatever, wouldn’t those organs just disappear when you absorbed them back up? You’d leave some poor sot with a hole in his belly.”
Caleb nodded slowly. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“This is gross,” complained Maiken.
“We might have to spend a little more time workshopping that particular idea,” Dr. Chen diplomatically told Caleb. “However, Caleb’s on the right track. That’s exactly the kind of outside-the-box, nontraditional thinking that I hope to inspire in you.” Dr. Chen’s pacing brought her over to Ran’s desk. “What about you, Ran? Any thoughts?”
Ran tensed up.
“No,” she said quietly.
Dr. Chen smiled. “Come on, Ran. There’re no wrong answers here. There’s got to be something you can add to the discussion.”
Ran felt the eyes of her classmates upon her. She racked her brain for something to say. With a touch, she could render an object’s molecules unstable. When she released an object thus charged, it would explode with all the concussive force of a grenade. What were the altruistic and beneficial applications of that?
That’s when the flash occurred. All of a sudden, Ran’s mind went hot and she was back in Tokyo. Buried under a pile of rubble, the roof of what used to be her family’s small apartment on top of her, her little brother crying somewhere close. Trapped. Suffocating. She shoved against the debris with all her might. The telekinesis that Ran hadn’t even discovered yet triggered and the chunks of roof went sailing off her. Some of them—the ones she’d been touching— exploded. She staggered to her feet, blood in her eyes, not sure what she’d just done.
Ran was the only Garde known to have manifested her telekinesis and primary Legacy at the same time. Such a trivial fact meant nothing to Ran now and meant even less back in Tokyo.
“Ran?”
She couldn’t hear her brother crying anymore.
“Ran?” Dr. Chen asked again.
The vision passed. She was back in the classroom, everyone staring at her. Her desk vibrated beneath her fingers. Ran glanced down, saw that she had begun to charge the polished wood desktop. With a deep breath, she pulled that energy back inside her, narrowly averting an explosion.
“No,” she said again, firmly, and this time Dr. Chen accepted that answer. Her teacher moved on, but not without a lingering look of concern for Ran.
After the seminar, Ran strode purposefully across the lawn towards the girls’ dorms. It had been a few weeks since she last experienced a flashback like the one that overcame her in class. Foolishly, she’d begun to hope that they were fading, the visions of Tokyo during the invasion relegated to an occasional nightmare. Not so. Ran wished she were harder. More in control.
Nigel caught up to her. He looped his hand through her arm, matching her pace.
“All right, then,” he said casually. “Nice day for a speed walk across campus, innit?”
Ran didn’t respond. Nigel was adept at interpreting her silences, though. She didn’t mind his presence.
“How’s the new roommate?” he asked, each of them having gotten new additions to their suites over the weekend. “Mine’s a real sweetheart. Excitable sort. Told me they’re gonna write about us in history books. I can get behind that. A welcome change of pace from ol’ Caleb, who I might very well find pulling guts out of a clone when I get back to our room.”
“Mine seems kind,” Ran replied. “Overwhelmed. Very tired.”
“Getting the tour from Isabela would wear out a marathon runner.”
“Yes,” Ran responded noncommittally. “She is a healer. A good Legacy.”
The atmosphere around them changed. It was subtle—the noises from other passing students became muffled and fuzzy, while their
own soft footfalls in the grass sounded louder thanks to a lack of background noise. Nigel was using his sonic manipulation Legacy. He put them in a bubble so that no one would be able to hear them.
“We gonna talk about what happened in class, love? Or are we just gonna dance around it?”
Ran pressed her lips together. She knew Nigel got a kick out of it when she played up her own robotic nature.
“I do not dance,” she replied stiffly.
Nigel snorted, but kept giving her that concerned look. “You had one of your episodes, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You not taking those meds Dr. Linda prescribed?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Ran stopped. She turned to look at him. “Are you taking yours?”
After learning about what happened to them during the invasion, Dr. Linda had prescribed both Ran and Nigel the same antianxiety medication. Ran remembered how Nigel had clicked their two identical pill bottles together like they were cheers-ing. Now, he flashed her a sly smile.
“Nah. You know they made me tired. I gotta stay functional.”
“As do I,” Ran said.
“So we’re both full Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nigel observed with a shrug. Then, his face got serious again, an expression Ran wasn’t used to seeing on his pockmarked cheeks. “Look, you know I tell you all my shit . . .”
“Yes,” Ran said.
“But if I’m ever talking too much, if you need to get something off your chest, you know I’m your man, right?”
Ran smiled. A rare thing. She put both her hands on Nigel’s bony shoulders, carefully avoiding the spiky studs sewn onto his denim vest.
“You are my man,” she said. “Do not worry about me.”
Nigel laughed brusquely and looked away. “All right. We had our moment, didn’t we? Let’s go back to silently repressing our feelings, yeah?”
Ran let her hands drop away and they resumed their walk across campus. Nigel’s words were stuck in her head, a couple of random phrases that hinted at some bigger inspiration.
Gotta stay functional.
Repressing our feelings.
Ran stopped walking.
“I have to go back and see Dr. Chen,” she said suddenly.
“Huh? About what?”
But Ran was already jogging back towards the administration building. “I will see you at dinner!” she called over her shoulder.
Ran found Dr. Chen still in the seminar room, tidying up for the next class. The jog back hadn’t come close to winding her and Ran had a habit of entering rooms quietly. When she finally spoke, her soft voice made Dr. Chen jump.
“I have an answer.”
“Oh, wow—Ran. You scared me.”
“I am sorry about class before,” Ran said, believing Dr. Chen was referring to the near explosion at her desk.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Chen replied kindly. “So, you gave my question a little more thought?”
“Yes,” Ran said, a tinge of excitement in her voice. “The best way for me to benefit society using my Legacy—the only way, I believe—is for me to stop using it entirely.”
“Well, Ran, that’s not exactly the point of the exercise—”
“Please inform the other administrators,” Ran concluded. Her message delivered, she was already halfway out the door. “I will no longer blow anything up.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TAYLOR COOK
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
TAYLOR’S FIRST FEW WEEKS AT THE ACADEMY WERE so busy that she almost forgot to be homesick.
After a meeting with Dr. Chen to assess where she stood academically, Taylor was given a full schedule of classes. She started every day with the brutal back-to-back of organic chemistry and trigonometry, two classes where she immediately felt overwhelmed. The teachers at the academy were different from the ones back home—faster talkers, sharp and enthusiastic, demanding.
Once her brain was appropriately mushed, Taylor finished her school day with European history and then classic literature. Taylor got into the habit of sitting in the back during history, keeping her head down where it was safe. Sometimes, there were objects literally flying around the room. With such a diverse population, class discussions often boiled over into intense debates. On her second day, Taylor witnessed a girl freeze her neighbor’s hands to his desk during a shouting match about socialism.
Literature class Taylor actually enjoyed. She’d always liked that class best, but back home her classmates weren’t such enthusiastic participators. At the Academy, most of the other kids always had something to say, although their book discussions were thankfully much mellower than their history ones.
“I remember Mrs. Reynolds used to have to call on people to get them to talk about The Scarlet Letter,” Taylor told her father over the phone, reminiscing about her ninth-grade English teacher. “It was like pulling teeth. I used to feel embarrassed raising my hand so much.”
“Shoot,” her dad replied, his smile audible. “I used to keep my head down, pretend to be asleep until the teacher moved on. Although, in those days, they’d smack you with a ruler . . .”
“It’s so different here,” Taylor said. She lowered her voice, even though the corner of the student union with the shared phones was completely empty. “These kids all have so much to say. They have so many opinions. This one guy got into an argument with our teacher because he doesn’t think Shakespeare actually existed. Nobody would ever come up with a crazy theory like that back in Turner, much less go at it with a teacher over it.”
“So, wait,” her dad said. “Shakespeare is real or no?”
“It’s like they’re all so sure of themselves,” Taylor continued. “Like because they got Legacies, everything about them is suddenly marked for greatness.”
“Well, you superpowered types are the chosen ones,” her dad said. Taylor laughed. “Don’t know why you’re laughing, kiddo. You’re one of ’em.”
Taylor still couldn’t believe that.
“You do know they record all those phone calls, yes?” Isabela scornfully said one night when Taylor returned from her nightly talk with her dad. “That is why we cannot have cell phones. There is no privacy. The internet, too. Think about the resources this Academy has, hmm? We should all have laptops. Two laptops! But we must go to the computer lab like third world people in the nineties. All so they can monitor us.”
Throughout her rant, Isabela lounged on the couch in their common room, her legs draped across Lofton. During her few weeks at the Academy, Taylor had learned that he was something of a fixture around their suite. She’d begun to think of him as handsome furniture.
“Wait,” Lofton said. “They keep track of our internet use?”
Isabela raised an eyebrow. “Why do you sound so concerned, hmm? What have you been looking at?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
“Pervert,” Isabela replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Do not touch me.”
“Anyway,” Taylor said, steering the conversation away from Lofton’s browsing habits. “I’m just talking to my dad. I don’t care if they listen in, if that’s even true.”
“Of course it is true!” Isbaela said. She quickly moved on. “Your dad’s coming to visit soon, yes?”
“Next month,” Taylor replied with a frown. The Academy allowed visits from family only once a month and she’d arrived just after the most recent Family Day. It’d been too long since she’d seen her dad face-to-face.
“Taylor’s dad is a muscular farm man and a bachelor. I am very excited to meet him,” Isabela explained to Lofton.
Taylor groaned. “You’re disgusting. I’ve got homework.”
And she did have homework. Essays and work sheets and lab reports, but also less mundane assignments. Every night, she was required to use her telekinesis to levitate grains of rice—not all at once, but one at a time—and keep count of how many she could manage before letting one drop. Teleki
netic precision, Taylor soon learned, was much more difficult than blunt force. By the end of her second week, she was up to thirty-seven.
“Very good!” Kopano said enthusiastically when she told him. “I can only do twenty-nine. Rice! I would much rather cook and eat it.”
Another day, another six hours of classes, followed by a few more hours of rigorous physical activity in the training center. Taylor and Kopano didn’t have any classes together, so they often found each other during gym time. They trained their telekinesis by tossing objects back and forth, chatting about their days in this strange new place. Neither of them was allowed to run the obstacle course yet—a daunting gauntlet of ropes and barbed wire, pits and water traps, powered by a projectile-launching AI that adapted to their abilities. They watched from the sidelines as their classmates attempted the course and came back bruised and bloodied, never able to reach the off switch at the end of the run.
There was regular exercise, too, under the watchful eye of the Academy’s staff of fitness professionals, who were all as impressively credentialed as the professors. Kopano chased Taylor around the track, huffing and puffing, unable to match her pace. In turn, Taylor looked on in awe as Kopano curled mammoth barbells.
Kopano winked at her. “My muscles are yawning,” he told her as he effortlessly curled another 150-pound weight. “These weights, they must be broken. Or else I am the strongest boy here. That is probably it. They think my Legacy is Fortem, like Nicolas, but that mine is presenting in a much different way.”
Taylor put her hands on her hips. “I saw Nicolas lifting way more than one fifty.”
“I am just warming up!” Kopano replied. He switched hands and Taylor noticed the barbell remained suspended in the air.
She glared at him, catching on. “You’re using your telekinesis, you cheater!”